What manner of evil is it that allowed then-Attorney General Janet Reno to ignore a report on her desk that provided crucial evidence exonerating a man who was rotting in jail? The exhaustive report by Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Bellows was commissioned by Reno, but when it raised questions about the unfair targeting of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, Reno chose to ignore it.

The report, completed in May 2000, was kept secret while Lee served the last four of the nine months he spent in solitary confinement under unusually harsh conditions instituted by Reno's office. Although he later was forced to accept a plea bargain for time served on a single charge of mishandling secret information, the government dropped the 58 other charges against Lee for far more grievous offenses.

Had the contents of this report been revealed, it would have been impossible for the government to deny Lee bail on the grounds that his release threatened national security. The 800-page report that sat on Reno's desk remains classified, but a small portion that was ordered released by a judge is scathing in its indictment of the government, charging that "the FBI has been investigating a crime which was never established to have occurred."

That is a reference to the alleged theft of the W-88 nuclear warhead, the subject of an investigation and hoary charges by a congressional committee that were played up dramatically in 1999 in the media, led by the New York Times.

The charges that would ensnare Lee stemmed from a Department of Energy investigation that, as the Bellows report charges, "contained very serious deficiencies, including numerous inconsistent and contradictory statements as well as unsubstantiated assertions. Other deficiencies lay just beneath the surface; even a cursory investigation -- had it been done by the FBI -- would have revealed them."

The most serious deficiency, super-hyped by uncritical media coverage, began with the unwarranted assumption that the Chinese weapons program had benefited from stolen nuclear secrets. But, as the Bellows report states, Energy Department weapons experts had concluded that the Chinese may have progressed on their own.

"Advances observed in the Chinese nuclear weapons program may have occurred indigenously," the report said. The Energy Department did not convey that information to the FBI and compounded the error by irrationally targeting Lee and the Los Alamos lab where he worked as the source of the purported crime. That erroneous information was carried as the lead in the front page New York Times story of March 6, 1999: "Working with nuclear secrets stolen from an American government laboratory, China has made a leap in the development of nuclear weapons."

There is still no hard evidence of any such theft, let alone a solid lead as to the source of such a breach of U.S. security. A five-page summary of the Bellows report makes it clear that a group of nuclear weapons experts convened by the Department of Energy early on expressed doubts about whether the Chinese had stolen secrets.

The Bellows report levels the serious charge that top Energy Department officials in charge of the department's administrative inquiry, or AI, distorted the evidence to target Lee and his wife, who also worked at the lab, to the exclusion of many other possible suspects: "The final report transmitted to the FBI was the product of an editing process that ultimately converted the 'AI' from a broad identification of potential suspects to a virtual indictment of the Lees. These editing changes materially altered the scope, tone and conclusion of the report and made it that much more likely that the FBI would focus solely on the Lees."

Much has been made of Bellows' conclusion that racism was not the motive in targeting Lee, an American citizen who was born in Taiwan. The charge of racism was made in sworn depositions by two highly placed government security experts after Bellows completed his report. But there is no doubt in the Bellows report that Lee was unfairly targeted.

"Given its slapdash quality, its flawed rationales, its complete mischaracterization of the predicate and its queer mash of intense review of some pertinent records and complete ignorance of other venues of compromise, once Wen Ho Lee was 'tagged' with the patina of suspicion . . . he would be 'it,' " Bellows said.

And once "tagged," Lee was presumed guilty until proved innocent by the government and the media. It was the responsibility of Attorney General Reno to guarantee the presumption of innocence. It is particularly offensive that she failed to uphold the standards of due process once she had been forewarned by the Bellows report, which she herself commissioned. A report that, outrageously, remains secret to this day with only a small fraction of its pages allowed to break loose for public scrutiny.

I have friends who know and have worked with Reno and speak of her in admiring terms, but what she did in the Lee case is unconscionable and, by the standards we apply to others around the world, borders on the criminal.